(no subject)

We're starting to run through the Criterion Blu-Rays, via Netflix, which for me means returning to a lot of movies I saw c. 15-18 when I thought great movies were great art. Which they sometimes are, but so much less often than the books--which you'll never run out of--that it's just silly to bother except as a sort of vacation. Saw:

Kagemusha

Excellent, not perfect Kurosawa, definitely helped by Blu Ray.

The Third Man
8 1/2
The Man who Fell to Earth

Nicholas Roeg is a bad director who thinks he's a great one. Firm enough conviction convinces, even strangely accesses glimmers of greatness (*cough* PT Anderson), and definitely puts a sort of slant on your film's more characteristic actual awfulness such that people can't tell it is that (*cough* Tarantino). Might explain Fellini to some extent, come to think of it.


The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Godawful from beyond space. Why didn't anyone warn us?

Wings of Desire
The Last Metro

Didn't get through these. The latter agitated my wife during a bad drug reaction. The former is pretty, especially that wall, but awful--I failed to get through it in my VHS days too.

Julie bought me The Seventh Seal as a Christmas gift, but there was some kind of delay at amazon and only we got it two weeks ago; we'll do that next. The Yojimbo/Sanjuro set's coming out right before my birthday, as is Days of Heaven. Julie's never seen that--we tried to watch the DVD but the sound was bad and gave her a headache. I was sad at the time but this makes it a blessing. That movie screams for Blu Ray.

We watched The 400 Blows too recently but that will really be something. Their other selections so far seem largely of the drying-paint school. Though I did like Ride With the Devil.

Mad Men 3 is coming out in a few weeks. In silly movie news, so is Road House; To Live and Die in LA comes out this week.

(no subject)

For all that, though, I like that The Man Who Fell to Earth was made. It's one of the mere handful of Gnostic movies, and what's more belongs mostly to the 'natural' strain to which I waveringly subscribe. Bowie's mission, flashes of images of a wife and family in some unfindable world that he must reach and irrigate, can't be completed here. Here there is too much and everything's too easy--the primary impulse gets scattered among the secondary, and in the end one is left only with alcohol, enabling companions who similarly failed, a lost and bad LP. A complement of Woman in the Dunes, say--curiously but not unconvincingly related to the disintegration of the space impulse post-Apollo 13, to the rise of technologies hypnotizing us with mere parts. Then "No, I'm not bitter" and the voice trails off and the white hat falls.

Presumably all of that was in the novel though because Roeg's handling is almost relentlessly tedious and indigestibly weird.

Having to defend why I'd liked it when younger I explained to her I simply hadn't seen Aguirre yet, though that one's at least half open to a condemnation of searching for your origins in someone else's yard, a la Bishop's conquistador poem.

Nor had I seen The Man Who Wasn't There, for that matter--presumably that title's a homage.